I recently bought a black Ipod Classic (the final 160GB version, MC293LL/A). It is used, but everything seemed fine when I used it with the standard Ipod firmware. That said, I don't think I tested moving large quantities of files onto it.

I then installed emCORE and then Rockbox using the Rockbox utility. It worked pretty well and played fine.

Then I moved >100 GB of music files onto it. Now all of a sudden I can't move any more, or create files on it -- file managers in Linux give me an input/output error. I can delete files, but I can't add any. Sometimes I can create folders and sometimes I can't. This happens on several different computers, using different file managers (Nautilus and Thunar), and different Ipod cords.

Also, not sure if this is related, but I noticed before this problem occurred that there was some inconsistency in behavior when I copied files to the Ipod. At first I found that in Thunar, I was unable to copy files/folders with special characters, but I could in Nautilus, where the special characters would be replaced by an underscore. But then a little while before I started getting the input/output errors, Nautilus also started giving me errors when I tried to move files or folders with special characters.

How do I determine if this is a hardware or software problem? I'm on version 575bd89-161216 and emCORE v0.2.3 r859. I also tried updating using the Rockbox utility, but it told me that there's no space on the disk (although as I mentioned above, Rockbox itself says there's plenty of space). Thanks so much!

(And huge thanks for all the work that's been done on Rockbox so far! I used an older version without any major issues for several years on my previous Ipod Classic that recently met its demise due to tragic circumstances involving Newton's law of universal gravitation.)

fsck from util-linux 2.20.1fsck.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)0x41: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt.1) Remove dirty bit2) No action? 2There is no backup boot sector.And there is no space for creating one!Got 99143680 bytes instead of 156138424 at 8192before exiting. Should I be reformatting at this point then, and how would I go about doing that? Thanks again.

After posting this, I found [Saint]'s post here explaining reformatting with emCORE, so I did that from the tools menu, ran the Rockbox fallback image, then downloaded and extracted a Rockbox binary to the Ipod again. After that, fsck doesn't show any errors, and everything has worked. Thanks so much.

Is an error like that normal and nothing to worry about, or is it likely to be a sign of hardware failure in the near future? I ask because I bought this device from Ebay, but it's still within the return period for a few more days.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who has made Rockbox so excellent, happy holidays to everyone celebrating them, and happy new year to all.